🔵 Piracy is in rude health in 2026 - and it is all powered by DSPs
If you thought the Anna's Archive leak was bad...
Regular readers will recall that I was raving about the Innioasis Y1 iPod clone mp3 player I bought recently, all for a princely £55. Grabbing this gave me cause to haunt some subreddits around MP3 players, and in doing so it became glaringly evident just how much piracy is booming in 2026.
Piracy never went away, but one might well argue that for a period, Spotify et al simply made it feel pointless on the basis you could access everything through DSPs’ platforms. Why download when you can stream instantly?
The problem is, with streaming feeling increasingly messy and enshittified, the “revive your iPod” movement seems to be growing daily. Not in a manner that would have shareholders of SPOT worried, granted, but the momentum continues to grow. Alongside that comes something of a “what’s the point?” view from artists (some, I note, not all), with “being on streaming earns me so little as to be pointless” opinions being aired across social media.
What really blew my mind, however, was how modern piracy works. No P2P, no Soulseek client needed. None of that; just a browser. Hit up any of the many websites out there, and you can select your DSP of choice, before tapping in your artist or album name and simply downloading it, right there, through the browser.
I won’t claim to be the most technical person, but it would appear these sites are somehow using DSP APIs to access music and the FFMPEG command line encoder to then extract or convert the file.
Some testing on my part suggests that one can easily access the music in FLAC (i.e. lossless) format, which requires one to select either Apple Music, Qobuz or Tidal in order to do so:
With that choice made, I can then search for any artist or release - or even a playlist - and grab it for download. I decided to therefore take the least legally questionable option for this article, and pirate my own work:
By clicking a download icon in the top-right corner, I find myself downloading the files in no time at all - and in FLAC lossless audio quality too. Ironically, they sound better than Spotify’s default setting. Take from that what you will.
Worth noting too is that Soundcloud and other sites also feature here; any music site offering streams appears to be fair game.
As subscription fatigue sets in, the readiness with which one can download files illegally is alarming. I would think it will only get worse as Agentic AI further empowers non-technical folk to find whatever loopholes possible to spin this kind of thing up.
I have seen many people outraged at the Anna’s Archive leak that saw Spotify’s entire repository of music pirated in full. In reality, the means by which that access was gained is still achievable, and in the most mundane of ways too. Ostensibly, grabbing this music for free is not harder than firing up your DSP of choice and hitting play.
We have already seen that suing Anna’s Archive has proven pointless; the piracy group simply ignored everything and - for now anyway - has melted into the background.
The same could be occurring here, wherein the tools to access and therefore rip music from DSPs become cloned and shared via Github (one platform already does this, I note) such that the same whack-a-mole game resumes as was the case with P2P clients like Limewire.
Obviously I am not going to name sites here, though one doesn’t need to work hard to find them. Again, the fact this can all be accessed through the browser only highlights how simple this has now become.
It got me thinking though; for a lot of artists, there’s a sense that DSPs pay them nothing anyway. Indeed, for those with less than 1000 plays, it literally pays them nothing in the case of Spotify and Deezer. With that in mind, how much would artists care if people are pirating their music rather than pay for it?
Granted, that’s me baiting the audience here, but at a stage where so many artists are struggling to generate meaningful revenue, I could certainly see a logic wherein they accept that they make nothing from people streaming their music anyway, such that reaching audiences and upselling on physical, experiential and other product types all becomes more interesting to them than any kind of streaming play.
A stretch? Perhaps. But even on the most basic level, people are hitting a subscription saturation point. If I am paying for multiple video streaming services and an audio service, and one can simply download those albums straight to a cheap MP3 player, which service am I going to cancel? Not Netflix or Amazon Prime.
I will be interested to see how this all pans out. One would hope that after the Anna’s Archives leak, a significant crackdown would occur. As things currently stand, the opposite is happening: grabbing your music, in lossless quality, for free, has never been more simple.
Have a great day,
D.
🎶 Listening to “Peace & Love - Wadadasow” by Dadawah. Shouts to Alec at Brassland for turning me onto this absolute gem of a release from 1974. Four tracks of hypnotic, repetitive reggae. Roots in style, minimal more than most. Just wonderful. I sent it to a friend suggesting he lights one up and relaxes deeply to this. I stand by that recommendation for any of you.
📺 Watching “Bad Eggs from Joe Kent-Walters” on YouTube. If you blended Mighty Boosh and The League of Gentlemen, you’d wind up with this pilot from Joe Kent-Walters that has that dark, surreal, highly creative touch. I loved it. Here’s hoping C4 commission a series.
🤖 Playing with Claude. Binning off Chat GPT for Claude feels a bit like moving from Apple to Amazon in terms of ethical righteousness, but either way I still feel better doing so. One thing I particularly liked however was this tool they built to allow you to port all the memory from GPT over to Claude. Clever.
Gleefully accepting music recommendations!
I do really enjoy getting suggestions for either existing music or forthcoming releases to check out. So, if there’s something you think I might like, do feel free to get in touch. Always keen to hear the weird and wonderful things going on out there. And, with 6000+ subscribers, I’m happy to spread word on things I’m loving too.
Thanks for the shoutout! I just came across it while revisiting your thoughts on the InnioAsis players — I'm actually considering picking one up right now.
My logic is, if they're pirating, they're listening; and if they're listening, they're either a)gonna want more substantial engagement with the source of the thing; and/or b) gonna want to talk about what they got. Both of those options benefit my projects far, far in excess of what I'll ever collect from DSPs as they currently allocate. I'll find other loot to sell the pirates.